Author Uma Ranganathan is living proof that moments of enlightenment can
illuminate even the most ordinary lives – hers being one such example – by
forever altering their course. Her most cherished inspirations span a delightfully
eclectic mix like Alfred E. Newman, J. Krishnamurti, Charlie Brown, her teacher
and guide Samuel Widmer, and the many cats that frolicked through her days.
Alongside these, various friends have joined her in exploring life through the
twin lenses of margaritas and meditation, shaping a journey that is both
whimsical and profound.

TLT: Your life journey blends counselling, spirituality, humour, and deep
introspection! What pivotal moment inspired you to translate these experiences
into your book, “Life, Death & Lung Fung Soup”?
Uma Ranganathan:
As far as I can remember I loved to write, to tell stories, and worked for several
years as a freelance journalist, so writing about the experiences in “Life, Death
& Lung Fung Soup” came naturally. What specifically led to the pieces was
having to spend two and a half months in bed, recovering from a broken leg
several years ago. Prior to this I had been scurrying around like a mad chicken,
from one task to another, not knowing in which order to attend to the numerous
jobs on hand. Forced bed rest put an immediate end to all of this busyness, and
opened the door to a quiet and deeply introspective phase about my life. This
included recapturing the moments, the thoughts, the feelings and encounters I
had had with various people in the previous years, the time spent in therapy as
well as my travels in Europe and the US. All this reflection was expressed
through the short pieces which make up the book.

TLT: The title itself is quirky and intriguing. What does ‘Lung Fung Soup’
symbolise in the context of life, death, and wisdom?
Uma Ranganathan:
The title was arrived at spontaneously, without much thought. It also happens
to be the title of one of the chapters in the book. Looking closer, it seems to me
that “Lung Fung Soup”, which I was once passionately fond of, (and still like alot!) stands for the kind of pleasure which so many of us become addicted to.
Most of us tend to cling to what pleases us, makes us feel good: food, drink,
drugs, sex, even work. Sometime it is past memories. Pleasure itself is not the
problem. Without it life would seem somewhat bland and lacking in spice. So
pleasure does have its place. The difficulty lies in our tendency to hang on to it,
to make it last. In the process we end up paying less attention to living in the
moment and more to planning events in the future that we think will make us
happy. We are often obsessed with trying to artificially prolong a feeling that is
enjoyable or beautiful. We don’t realize that this is not possible, that the
experience of beauty and genuine pleasure is a gift, which depends on its very
unpredictability. In our constant attempt to recall past experience of beauty and
pleasure, we tend to bypass life itself.

TLT: Your inspirations range from the philosophical thinkers to the
comic characters! How did this eclectic mix shape the tone and narrative style
of the book?
Uma Ranganathan:
The mix is possibly what defines me as a person. I find I have this side which is
serious and given to hours of contemplation. Side by side there’s another me,
which loves to poke fun at my own seriousness and to laugh about the way I am
and the subjects I contemplate. I am equally at home with classic works of
fiction, ancient and modern philosophers, as I am laughing out loud over J.D.
Perelmann, James Thurber or Douglas Adams’s comic science fiction.
As you suggest, the pieces in this collection, were influenced by a rather strange
mélange of authors and teachings. It may well leave readers – especially those
looking for answers or for more direction or continuity – befuddled and
wondering what it’s all about. The short essays were unpremeditated and it felt
important to keep to the style in which they were written, without too much
restructuring to suit conventional taste. This way, at least to me, it felt close to
the weird mix which life itself brings with it – whimsical, sad, joyful, deep,
something to wonder at. The book was written over a period of about three
weeks. I would say it’s a kind of self portrait of the way I was at the time and
probably still am, in some ways. As I’ve mentioned in the book, one is
constantly changing so it’s hard to pin down who exactly you are in the long
term.

TLT: As a psychotherapist, you’ve explored the depths of the human
mind. So, how did your professional experiences influence the themes of
absurdity and insight in your writing?

Uma Ranganathan:
The book was written just about the time I was setting out on my career as a
psychotherapist so I’m not sure how much of my professional experience comes
into the picture. However, long before training to work as a therapist, I was
fascinated by the working of the human as well as the animal mind. This is in
fact, what led me into the field of therapy. Besides this I had had my own
experience of growing up with a disability (polio in early life) and taught deaf
children and adults, so side by side with what I learned from my formal
education, a large part of my learning was through self observation and
observing other people. Luckily I had friends around me with a great sense of
humor so we would often end up laughing interminably at ourselves, our own,
or each others’ foibles and flaws.
This, combined with my personal observations and reflections about life
undoubtedly played a role in the way the book was written. I had already begun
to question how human beings related to each other at an early stage. For a start,
there were the incomprehensible disparities in the way we lived, the stark
barriers between us individuals depending on our economic, social or religious
backgrounds. This is something I always found difficult to understand or accept.
There were many other absurdities in our behaviour, our attitude, our opinions,
which we seemed to accept as the norm. In the course of time, I learned to take
all this with a pinch of salt. Later on as a therapist, I learned to use anger as a
tool to try and effect change around me, through encouraging friends as well as
clients to question their attitudes, their thinking, in fact everything around them.
My experience of therapy both as a client and in the later years, as
psychotherapist, deepened my understanding of myself and of others and
opened up the possibility of us together creating a new kind of society. The
process included having to accept all the feelings which went along with being
human – the sadness , the hopelessness at times, the pain.

TLT: The book balances humour with profound life lessons. How do you
ensure that the humour enhances rather than dilutes the depth of your message?

Uma Ranganathan:
Again, there was not much planning behind the book. If humor does enhance
the depth of the message it was not because any great thought or planning went
into it. Maybe it comes out of being authentic, and not using humor as a tool to
escape difficult emotions. You are not manufacturing a certain vision but rather,
presenting what you actually feel and sense in yourself, communicating what
you see. Humor is an inextricable part of the experience of being human,
alongside the frustration and the pain. It seems to me that authentic expression,
by its nature, embraces the anomalies of life without attempting to polish or
beautify the rough edges.

TLT: You mention viewing life as a “cosmic rollercoaster.” In your
opinion, what is the biggest mistake people make while navigating this ride?
Uma Ranganathan:
Over the centuries we have lost touch with a certain elemental aspect of life,
which I believe our forebearers once had. We have forgotten that we are part of
the great big river of life. As a result we’ve lost our trust in life, in nature. We
are just not able to trust life to carry us where we need to go. To trust life
doesn’t mean sitting back and letting life do all the work, it doesn’t mean not
making any effort to grow, but rather, it needs us to develop our intuition, which
will help us to figure out how to navigate the currents. I do believe that the
process is a kind of co-creation where life (or destiny if you like) plays its part
and so do I, in shaping it, in the way I live. The two go hand in hand.
Instead of allowing ourselves to cultivate this quiet space in our minds where
we sense when it’s time “to do” and when we need to wait, we get lost in
meaningless activities that deplete our energy and erode the subtle intelligence
that enables us to intuit what we need to do. What hinders us is our pathological
need for security, along with the need to constantly please people, our craving
for respectability and so on.

TLT: Your journey includes diverse fields like journalism, deaf
education, and therapy. How have these varied experiences contributed to your
understanding of human behaviour?

Uma Ranganathan:
Every field I’ve worked in, has significantly contributed to my understanding of
life and human behaviour, and because of that, to who I am today. As a
journalist I had the chance to visit different places, interview a variety of
individuals working in different spheres, and it helped tremendously to broaden
my perspective. The years I spent in educating deaf adults and children, made
me understand the helplessness and pain of those who are not considered
“normal”, especially the children who came from underprivileged backgrounds.
My experience of editing and publishing a magazine for World Wildlife Fund
brought me into deeper contact with nature and people interested in protecting
the environment. My parents who were nature lovers had traveled extensively
with us kids, to various wildlife parks and game sanctuaries. All this helped me
to both appreciate nature and realize how little we value it in our country by
decimating huge swathes of it in the name of “progress”.

TLT: The book encourages the readers to embrace both the absurd and
the meaningful. How can one practically cultivate this balance in everyday life?
Uma Ranganathan:
It’s not easy, but the only way to do it is to let go of one’s self importance and
to loosen up one’s grip on the thought process. Thinking, on its own is fine, but
when it consumes your time and energy it turns you into a bit of a robot, a
mechanical doll. Most people find it difficult to distinguish between what we
call “thinking” and what we mean by “perception”. The two are entirely
different. Thinking is the kind of analytical activity we indulge in all the time,
measuring everything – ourselves with others, the value of a job in terms of
money rather than what interests us and so on. Perception is a way of looking at
the world directly as Krishnamurti says, without labels. It’s a direct experience
of things, of people, of events. When we think too much instead of observing
what is before us, we fail to feel into the person sitting next to us. We fail to
connect. There is this huge gap, a disconnect which we try to bridge through
words.
We also get trapped in expectations, in images of ourselves and others, and find
it difficult to accept life the way it is, with its paradoxical mix of absurdity and
meaningfulness. Life is not exactly here to please us. But the trick is that we canderive much pleasure, actually joy, from it when we learn to navigate the
currents.

TLT: You’ve worked extensively in community-building and conflict
resolution! How does this perspective reflect in your storytelling?
Uma Ranganathan:
Active involvement with community building came at a much later stage but
even in those early days I was probably looking for a way, without realizing it,
to bring people together in a way that felt good but also real and authentic. I
feel the book reflects this yearning for peace, togetherness and authentic
contact, which is what real (or intentional) community is about.

TLT: Your narrative suggests that wisdom can be found in ordinary
moments. Could you share a simple, everyday experience that profoundly
shifted your perspective?
Uma Ranganathan:
What do we really mean finally, by wisdom? Isn’t it to do with perception that
reaches deep, that helps us to see connections in our lives, with each other, with
life itself, unhampered by the usual conditioning of our minds? So in the
moments when you drop that over-analytical voice in you and just look, you get
a deep sense of life in motion. You can feel into the nature of anger, of violence,
of many other feelings and states of mind. There was this moment once, in my
early twenties, when I found myself in a state of deep disappointment and
despair. I was most likely wallowing in it when, as I was walking along I caught
sight of a Gulmohar tree in full bloom. The sight of those flaming red flowers,
took my breath away and in that moment there was no anger, only this sense of
beauty and wonder and I saw how easy it was to dissolve so-called “bad
feelings” and move on. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you forget what caused
the feelings. Maybe it was some injustice or untruth or whatever. But when you
cease to struggle with the combination of rage and self pity in yourself, you can
address a problem more productively.

TLT: If the readers could walk away with just one mindset shift after
reading your book, what would you want that to be?
Uma Ranganathan:The shift would be from constantly living in the head and in our thoughts, to
living in the moment. To living with awareness rather than through the medium
of opinions and images of ourselves and others. All of us grow up heavily
conditioned to think and behave in a certain way, a way which is not necessarily
healthy, wise or kind, but rather prejudiced, narrow-minded and harmful for the
environment. The shift we’re talking about happens when a person sees through
this conditioning and shakes it off. Without the weight of the conditioning we
are able to think more freely and see ourselves and the world more clearly. It is
then possible to take action which is beneficial not only for ourselves as
individuals but for the community, or society as a whole. After all we are
eventually all connected at the deeper level and as we are seeing in the world
today, action taken by an individual anywhere in the world can have
repercussions in the whole fabric of society.